Pentagon’s IG moves to practice of disclosure-by-default

By Jared Serbu, Federal News Radio, Sept. 19, 2016

Careful watchers of the Defense Department Inspector General’s website will have noticed that over the last few months, the IG has been posting public summaries or redacted versions of its classified or “for official use only” reports — sometimes on the same day the full versions are released to the folks with security clearances.

Records management nerds know this practice as “proactive disclosure,” and under the FOIA Improvements Act, it’s something all agencies are supposed to do if they’ve gotten a request for the same records at least three times.

The DoD IG deserves credit for going one step further via a newly published policy that requires its staff to turn even its classified reports into a publicly-releasable format if doing so is at all possible — without waiting for anyone to ask for them via the Freedom of Information Act.